Thursday, July 07, 2005

Croesus Gets Richer

Enron. WorldCom. HealthSouth. Tyco. All symbols of brazen dishonesty and greed, the powerful shields of rich men getting richer by any means possible. If there is any positive outcome from the downfall of these companies and the prosecution of their leaders' malfeasance, it's probably a cautionary lesson to the public to keep your leaders accountable. And a cautionary lesson to leaders to honor public trust. I'd like to think that from now on we'll be shcoked by revelations of abuse of power, of cronyism, of back-room dealmaking, and hidden agreements. Those were the ways of the pre-Enron days, before the pension plans vanished, and the CEO's went on trial.

But there are always some people who hate to say goodbye to the good old days and the good old boys, and it's just a shame that it happens to be the administration. We learned today that the United States military has signed yet another order with Halliburton to do nearly $5 billion in new work in Iraq under a giant logistics contract that has so far earned the company $9.1 billion. We also learned that the new deal, worth $4.97 billion over the next year, was not made public when it was signed because the Army did not consider that such an announcement was necessary.

Well, gosh, if the Pentagon says that it was not necessecary to make public the signing off of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to a corporate behemoth currently under investigation for corruption, false accounting and even embezzlement, well it seems like we ought to take their word for it.